Site Presented By
Monday, Nov 9, 2009
In his bittersweet documentary "Stone Reader," Mark Moskowitz tries to track down a vanished novelist -- and a fading conception of literary greatness.
Feb 13, 2003 | There's a telling scene early on in Mark Moskowitz's documentary about his quest to find the author of a book he loves, a first novel published in 1972. He shows up at the Maine home of John Seelye, the reviewer whose rave in the New York Times convinced Moskowitz to buy the novel, and starts unloading copies of other books, his favorites, practically shoveling them into Seelye's arms, hoping, it seems, for a positive reaction, a flush of recognition. Occasionally Seelye has read one of them and even liked it, but more often than not he responds with a shrug, a shake of the head, or a noncommittal "It's good," that thing people say when they find a work admirable but not enchanting, or at least not as much so as you do.
"It was good," in that same indifferent tone of voice, is exactly what Moskowitz says of Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea" in another scene. One of his bookish friends has been telling him about how much he loved the novel in his youth. Throughout the film, Moskowitz keeps pushing copies of the book that serves as the premise for this film, "The Stones of Summer" by Dow Mossman, on various pals, but most of them explain that they "couldn't get into it," which is what Moskowitz himself said when he first tried the book back in the '70s. He opened it again in 1998 and fell under its spell, and "Stone Reader" is his answer to the discovery that Mossman never published another book.
Ostensibly, "Stone Reader" (which opens this week at New York's Film Forum before a planned national rollout) is the story of how hard it is to be a genius, or at least a "serious" literary writer, and of how fickle the fortunes of the publishing industry can be. But that is an old and tired story; what "Stone Reader" offers that's new is its portrayal of reading not as a supremely civilized and soulful activity but as a lonely, thwarting and sometimes painfully embarrassing one.
Adoring a book and trying to convince other people of its merits can make you feel like a Jehovah's Witness. If we're honest about it, most of us do not welcome book recommendations. Sometimes it seems that there is no more annoying pair of sentences than "You should read this book. You'd really like it." The more passionate the endorsement, the more suspect it becomes. The truth is that "You'd really like it" rarely means the speaker has taken into careful consideration your tastes and interests and is suggesting this book accordingly. Instead, it means "I love this book and can't bear the fact that I have no one to share it with, that the thoughts and emotions it stirred in me are swirling around the confines of my skull like hallucinations. Read it, please, and make me feel less alone."
"Stone Reader"
Directed by Mark Moskowitz
Moskowitz has good cause to feel isolated in his enthusiasm for "The Stones of Summer"; he spends at least half of the film interviewing people who have never heard of it, from the late literary critic Leslie Fiedler to Bob Gottlieb, who was the editor of Joseph Heller's "Catch-22." He finds people who attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop during the years Mossman was there and other novelists published by Bobbs Merrill (a press that shortly thereafter was ordered by its corporate owners to leave off publishing fiction entirely); none of them even remember Mossman.
Seelye, the Times reviewer, never met Mossman and doesn't know what happened to him. Moskowitz even flies to Florida to show the book's jacket designer the cover art, hoping it'll refresh his memory. The designer, polite but baffled, says: "I just don't remember it. It looks familiar, but I've done hundreds of books." Moskowitz is persistent, though, and people humor him. "I can't believe a guy could write a book this good and just disappear and never do anything again," he says.
Eventually, Moskowitz's investigative fortunes improve, but the whole "quest" angle of the film is a shaggy-dog story; for the cost of the airfare to Florida he could've hired a private detective to track Mossman down in a matter of days. Much of "Stone Reader" is similarly spun out of the flimsiest stuff, visually speaking. Writing is a famously noncinematic activity, but it turns out that reading is even more so, leaving the documentarian in a fix. Moskowitz makes his living filming political ads, however, which must account for his expertise at pairing unphotogenic content with feel-good pictures.
